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Opinion

Sennecaster's RfA debriefing

I ran for adminship (230/0/0) successfully with the bit flipping on December 25, 2024. I took a pretty uncommon "path" to RFA compared to most people, especially among the admin classes of the past 2 years. Here's a collection of unsorted and not-well-organized thoughts about my run.

TL;DR

My RFA felt very atypical and my experience drastically differed to others. Do not use this to dismiss their experiences or criticism of RFA.
It takes a village, as the saying goes. I would not be here without the countless editors who have given me feedback and support.
RFA is stressful inherently. I was not stressed during my run, but the prep was stressful.
This is not an easy path to RFA. You don't go my route without genuinely having a passion for boring.

Planning

I joined in March 2021 and got involved in copyright cleanup almost immediately. I've edited wikis before and I joined the community Discord early on. I closed a few cases and started clerking copyright problems out of what I saw as necessity; a large backlog of pages needed to be checked and I had experience and time to do so. By my first year, I felt pretty confident with how I was handling content policy. By then, I was already running into situations where I needed to wait for an admin to action my requests, or even declined because I couldn't explain the task clearly enough in a {{db-g6}}. My goal of reducing the amount of work at copyright problems for admins to simply be "revdel Sennecaster's edits" or "delete this article" wasn't going as planned.

A few people told me throughout my first year that I would make a good admin one day. I reached out to TheresNoTime, Barkeep49, and Nosebagbear over Discord in the second half of 2022 to get feedback, and there we discussed temperament, soft power, and not letting people get to you much. More importantly, people wanted me to be a better person and editor, not just how to become an admin. I would not be at RFA with the support I had if I didn't take on vital criticism about how I was approaching certain situations.

I had to delay my RFA multiple times; we initially planned in April 2023, then over the summer, then pushing it to sometime in 2024, and finally getting enough activity in the second half of 2024to make it possible. The whole time, we were trying to predict exactly what RFA voters would think about me. That was stressful. I spent too much energy worrying about how my actions would be taken instead of taking the actions that turned out fine anyways.

By the time that I was ready to run, my one nominator, Moneytrees was unable to due to timing issues. I had already confirmed with Premeditated Chaos, so I ended up asking leek to nom me, which she did with much enthusiasm. When admin elections started, more people asked me to run, which I heavily debated doing over a traditional RFA. Both timing and initial reservations prevented me in the end.

I asked two admins that really only knew me in passing, Hey man im josh and Asilvering, over what they looked for in RFA candidates. They were people unfamiliar with my work but people I consider with good judgment of character. After admin elections concluded, my noms and I were completely confident about my run; there was nothing more I could do besides speedrun writing an article to boost my chances, and the best thing to do was to continue as I was. It was also becoming increasingly clear to others around me that I was being held back significantly by my lack of tools; I was constantly asking for admins to do revdels or pointing out histmerges that needed to be done.

Transclusion + RFA week

Despite the amount of changes RFA has undergone since I joined, I was confident going in; I had a strong need for the tools that my nominators pushed me to highlight and highlighted themselves, I had a good record recently, and I had a positive impact on the people around me. I did not know what the result would be, but I felt that my chances of failing were low. I was not stressed during my RFA, I found it an overall positive experience. But I also walked away with the 3rd highest unanimous RFA, a criminally low amount of questions compared to others, and basically zero controversy. The feedback and appreciation from the community was beyond what I expected, and I doubt that the warm fuzzy feelings I had when I saw how well the first day was going will fade.

A few lessons I think are worth taking away from my RFA/made it easier:

We are focusing less on having rigid amounts of FAs and GAs required to demonstrate content experience. We still (rightfully) apply scrutiny to people without any articles past a stub — or articles not passing NPP without maintenance tags — but I didn't catch flak for not having a lot of content. Espresso Addict's vote emphasized this.
It pays off to do visible good work. Being helpful, constructive, and demonstrating that you can be trusted with advanced permissions goes a long way.
You do not need to be a jack-of-all-trades. Sometimes, sticking to just one or two areas and being really good at it is better.
Copyright is becoming its own "path" to adminship, but it doesn't work like others. It's a very clearly delineated area of work that interacts with both content and other editors, and has many tasks that only admins can complete. What makes copyright difficult is being good at it without being controversial; we operate on a careful balance (as seen by the many dramas throughout Wikipedia's history surrounding CCI) and it has a very steep learning curve.
When both the nominators and the candidate are confident in each other and themselves, the whole process is easier. We could joke around while prepping and I knew that even if things got rough, I would have a phenomenal support team and that what was written at my RFA would not detract from my contributions.
Having strong nominator statements/self-nom statements and Q1-3's. I tried to cover all of my bases in my questions and nominator statements, so people reviewing me would know exactly what I do, how I do things, and why I should have the tools.
My run was largely planned over Discord. I had a group chat with nominators and a few others, to prevent miscommunication alongside actual coordinating, and a lot of people reached out via DMs with support. I did receive a couple of emails about RFA. I found it convenient, as more than one person could actually look at what I was writing for question responses, and we didn't have any issues with conflicting advice.